Car analogies (and generalizations in general) are not so useful.

I've seen many cases (and been frustrated) working in a corporation where high levels of caution end up creating much more total work to make changes incremental. And when you do finish, the code is often not is nice as if it had been all done at once (at which point it probably gets left as is as more important things than refactoring, in the eye of business people, come along).